ABSTRACT
'Interesting philosophy', Richard Rorty writes in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things. For there to be a change, Rorty suggests, something has had to begin to feel like a nuisance. But this entrenched vocabulary has to begin to seem like a nuisance—to seem like an irritant, or an obstacle, or a saboteur—for something new to happen. Rorty's blithe and impressively light-hearted solution to the nuisance of an entrenched philosophical vocabulary is to regard its traditional questions as apparently futile, ignore them, and replace them with new and possibly more interesting questions. And, of course, a nuisance is something by definition that one can not ignore; if one could ignore it, it would not become a nuisance.
